Considering how in tune they sound on their debut album, it’s surprising to learn that musicians and married couple Larry Campbell and Teresa Williams aren’t in harmony about everything.

In a phone conversation last week from their home in Bearsville, New York, Campbell said their concert Saturday at Higher Ground would be as a duo. Williams disagreed, saying that she thought it was with a full band. She checked their schedule, which said they’d have a backing band. Campbell still wasn’t convinced.

Duo or band, in a way, doesn’t really matter; Campbell and Williams have shown over their long careers that they can fit into any configuration. That’s what happens when you spend years in supporting roles for big-name acts such as Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Emmylou Harris, and perhaps their most significant collaborator, Levon Helm of The Band.

Helm reached out to them to play key roles for him after his comeback from throat cancer. He couldn’t sing well anymore but Williams sure could, and Campbell served as Helm’s band leader. They learned much from the legendary musician who succumbed to cancer in 2012.

They performed a sold-out Burlington Discover Jazz Festival show at the Flynn Center in 2010 that was completely joyous, with Helm smiling for the duration. “Every show for the entire eight years we were with that guy, that’s where he was,” Campbell said “Certainly not consciously, but in his whole make-up, after all the crap he had been through in his life, and much of it self-imposed, he was at a point of ‘Let’s just do this because we love to do this, and that will lead to wherever it leads. If it’s successful it’s because it’s successful for the right reasons.’ And we were all pretty much in that frame of mind.”

Campbell and Williams, who married after meeting in a New York City club in the 1980s, had long planned to record an album together, but their time with Helm deferred that dream. Their work with Helm, it turns out, strengthened the self-titled album that finally came out in 2015.

“When I left Dylan’s band and Teresa had just gotten off the road at the same time, we started thinking maybe we could do something together,” Campbell said. Instead they worked with Helm, who was all about letting the musicians in his band step up to the microphone. “And then this thing with Levon just came up and in its own way it gave us this environment to really hone what her and I can do together.”

"At this stage in our lives I can't imagine a better situation than being able to get out there together," Larry Campbell said of his shows with Teresa Williams.(Photo: COURTESY MARK SELIGER)

“It just really was an organic thing — ‘What song could we do at this point in the show?’” Williams said. “It wasn’t quite so calculated.”

Their album showcases Campbell’s musicality and Williams’ powerful voice. She seizes the role of get-out-of-my-way belter on the show-stopping gospel number “Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning.” Some of the 11 songs on the album evoke a bluesy, rocking duet between Bonnie Raitt and Eric Clapton. The easy-going country-tinged tunes have a cohesiveness of lives lived together a la George Jones and Tammy Wynette.

“If that is what’s coming out, I’m delighted,” Campbell said. “The thing I hope comes across when we do this is some sort of honesty, some sort of honest depiction of what we do.”

After all those years of talking about making an album, Campbell is happy with the result that was so long in coming.

“It’s completely rewarding,” he said, “as much and more than I imagined it would be.”

“Oh, that’s nice, Larry,” Williams said with a sweet, sing-song Southern voice reflecting her deep family roots in Tennessee. Once again, she and Campbell were in harmony.

Contact Brent Hallenbeck at 660-1844 or bhallenbeck@freepressmedia.com. Follow Brent on Twitter at www.twitter.com/BrentHallenbeck.